Was imperial rule indeed so antithetical to local agency, or was it in fact a facilitating factor in the formation and consolidation of local elite identities? Did the Hasmoneans and their supporters really espouse such an anti-imperial political theology as is often associated with them? What would change in our understanding of emerging Judaism and the Jewish political imagination if we were to reimagine the Hasmonean period without such a heavy emphasis on Jewish national and religious identity in opposition to empire?

The goal of this dissertation is to provide an example of what insights can be gained when emotions—in particular, disgust—are examined in an archive traditionally mined for theological and historical insights.

I wanted to make this intervention because the ubiquity of humans being described as enslaved to God or Christ is easy to miss. As Clarice Martin demonstrated in her 1990 article on womanist biblical interpretation and inclusive translation, scholars and translators have often disguised or euphemized language of enslavement because of a discomfort with acknowledging the presence of enslaved people within the pages of the Bible. I argue that the process of undoing euphemistic translation and uncovering the presence and logics of enslavement in Jewish and Christian literature does not stop with those depicted as enslaved to humans, but extends to those depicted as enslaved to deities.

Augustine drew on the central Christian idea of sacramentum—a technical but expansive concept indicating the mysterious conjoining of the sensible to the intelligible, the human to the divine—to produce a unified theory of existence that stands in contrast to the dualisms of his time.

By thinking with premodern Christians as they imagined Muslims and Jews, we can also take a reflexive look at ourselves in the present. How and why do we identify with objects, particularly those from the past?

The implications for our understanding of Julian and Cyril, as well as the ancient traditions they represented and maintained, are enormous. But the implications extend further still, as should be clear from my concluding list of possible indicators that suggest narrative conflict may be at play between rival traditions, past or otherwise.

“I contend, however, that the impetus to reconstruct a historical account of ‘what really happened’ has significantly undertheorized the differing ways in which biblical texts both recount and shape the very idea of destruction of Jerusalem.”

My doctoral thesis intervenes in this discussion by focusing this relatively new analytical gaze on Paul’s self-presentation in his undisputed letters to argue that the apostle evades straightforward classification as either disrupting or conforming to masculine norms.

Advisory Board member Andrew Jacobs reflects upon the past 10 years of Ancient Jew Review.

In this article, I want to contextualize the term polupragmosunē as it is used in the works of other writers in the Roman imperial period (particularly Plutarch, Apuleius, Lucian, and Tertullian) and demonstrate how polupragmosunē is a key component of Diognetus’s anti-Jewish rhetoric and construction of uniquely Christian knowledge.

The ten most-read publications from Ancient Jew Review for the year 2023.

What did she want us to see and know differently? How did she want to shape us?

Dr. Steven D. Fraade wrote this article while on sabbatical in 1988. It was accepted for publication soon after, but the journal wanted substantial cuts due to the space constraints at the time. AJR is pleased to give this article a permanent home and hope it will inspire future work on this important subject.

The ten most-read publications from Ancient Jew Review for the year 2022.

When it came to material culture, I faced another set of accessibility-related roadblocks. I had come to internalize the perspective from the opening of this essay: material culture constituted an evidentiary corpus for which vision was a precondition for insightful analysis. Such an opinion has an ancient pedigree.

Michael Press on the myth of Moses Shapira as a master forger: “So we are left with the image of Shapira — and that image, of a master forger and genius, is now entrenched. It seems impervious to the reality that he forged almost nothing himself, that he mostly sold fakes made by others. It seems unaffected by the fact that he and his collaborators were actually poor forgers.”

As I learned more about the literature and history of my tradition, I found myself drawn to another important author, Narsai, and wondered whether someday a similarly accessible and instructive volume might be written about him. This project has been both a dream and an aspiration ever since.

From the outset, I envisaged two clearly distinct books, one popular and the other more academic, one with fewer footnotes than the other.

Whereas scholarship has tended to investigate this question by analyzing the development of Jewish apocalypticism, afterlife beliefs, and theodicy during the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, my analysis of consolatory rhetoric in Hellenistic Judaism offers a more comprehensive approach.

To be frank, I just don’t think any of our texts say this. Or, if some of them do, alternative readings are available and perhaps more plausible. In fact, the Manichaeans themselves do not have a single model of prophethood (although they do exhibit a push for systematicity).

These texts offered a window onto the literary creativity and inventiveness of the early Syriac tradition itself.

My research contributes participates in this ongoing conversation by exploring fresh methodological approaches to uncover the ways New Testament literature bears witness to ritual practices among early Christians.

The Psalms anthologize some of the poetry that circulated in ancient Israel and the Second Temple period. They are not fun to read—let alone straight through. No narrative arc or compelling character draws one into their pages. And the poems are often repetitive, sometimes boring and nonsensical. So why did my mother—and countless others like her—find reading the Psalter as part of their life’s routine meaningful?

In some ways, Staging the Sacred proved a thoroughly disconcerting study.  As I wrote it, I was continually reminded that the texts I have spent my career learning to read are, in practical terms, far removed from the actual phenomena I so wanted to study, the experience of the ancient synagogue.  The texts resemble two-dimensional, frozen echoes from which I have tried to coax ghostly traces (perhaps illusions) of more dimensions.  In the end, these poems—each a gem in its own way, a stone in the gorgeous mosaic of late antique hymnody—yielded up more insight than I might have thought they would. 

“My work on the name-database has alerted me to the importance of corpora. I realize that most academics believe that their major contribution to world knowledge is their brilliant theses, in which they demolish the work of their predecessors and suggest new understandings of history and the sources that tell it. And indeed, theses are important and new thinking makes us think hard and keep history alive (albeit in a more “modern” or updated version). However, most theses, as brilliant as they may appear at the time they were composed, tend to have a short shelf-life.”

“I often think that scholarly understanding of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls and I grew up together; over the years, and now decades, a paradigm shift has occurred in the field, and my own views have changed along with it.”

The books that were eventually included in the canon share “family resemblances” with other books left out of the canon. For instance, just as the same eye colour can be found in people belonging to unrelated families, so too the story of Israel is evident in canonical and non-canonical books.

“From my first book to my most recent, comparison (and its pitfalls), both within Judaism and without, has been a constant preoccupation as I continued to focus on texts of legal interpretation, and to struggle with how best to translate the rabbinic texts upon which I was commenting and to what extent either should inform or presume the other.”

Richard Kalmin offers a retrospective of his work on the historical analysis of Talmudic narratives.

Dr. Beth Berkowitz writes a retrospective of her first book, Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford UP, 2006). 

Erich Gruen with a retrospective of his work: “If a consistent thread runs through my studies of Jewish history in the context of classical antiquity, it can be found in resistance to the common portrayal of Jews as victims.”

For my part, I am satisfied that I have said what I can, and want, to say about this Gospel.  Aside from my growing discomfort with John’s anti-Jewish language, I have gained much from my longstanding relationship with this Gospel, including a community of scholars whom I value and respect.